Was Reagan A Republican?

Michael Kinsley, in a fun article in Atlantic Monthly,says no.

He bases this somewhat surprising finding on the recently discussed ‘principles’ that the Tea Party movement was urging on the GOP as a litmus test for future candidates. People were allowed to fail on two of the ten counts. Only those who passed would have been eligible for GOP funding in elections. According to Kinsley Reagan would have failed on at least four counts. He therefore could not run for high office as a Republican.

Which is odd given his near saintlike status amongst GOP hard core supporters.

“Like arsonists who set fire to houses in order to ride the fire engine, the Republicans are presenting themselves as fiscal conservatives. The media and the voters, so inured to outmoded stereotypes allow that to happen.”

Why do I raise this amusing fact?

Because as we enter the twilight zone of our non-debate over the federal budget Reagan casts a long shadow. He was the original Republican spendthrift. Yet voters seem to recall him as being hard on government. I knew his words beguiled, but they also apparently misled.

Hard facts are uncomfortable for all of us. Few people can confront reality without trying to bend it to conform more closely with their personal outlook on life. Most often this is a benign process. Sometimes it is malign. The ‘misremembering’ of Reagan’s term in office is an example of the malignancy overlaying an outlook over the facts can cause.

It screws up later discussions.

Our current budget malaise is being [non] debated in the context of fairly well worn stereotypes: Republicans are viewed by voters as flinty, small government, fiscally conservative folks; while Democrats are big budget, high tax, and profligate deficit spenders.

This is a perversion of the history of the past three decades.

Both parties have overseen increases in government spending. The Federal Budget has mushroomed over the last thirty years. As Kinsley points out Reagan himself oversaw a massive 92% increase in Federal spending – from $517 billion per year to $991 per year – and a big jump in the government’s share of GDP – from a low of 21.7% to a high of 22.9%. Let’s be fair and note that that share of GDP settled back down to 21.3% in Reagan’s last year, a level it bounced around until Clinton’s term when it was driven down to 18.4%

Also during Reagan’s years the Federal deficit rose from 4.9% of GDP to 5.8%, and the national debt rose from $909 billion to $2.6 trillion.

This ugly record of fiscal mismanagement is something I have pointed to for years. There was very little conservative about Reagan’s economic policies other than his failed introduction of the trickle down theory: his tax cuts never engendered enough growth to offset the lost revenues implied by those cuts – as the evidence of the growing deficits and national debt prove.

So on this basis Reagan is very obviously not a Republican. At least according to whoever put together those Tea Party principles.

As for George W. Bush. Well let’s just say that if the Tea Party principles were a scale, with a ten representing economically sound conservatism: he’d be a one. Not only did he preside over a ballooning deficit and national debt, he did so on purpose. He actively encouraged our headlong race into penury.

During the last three decades only Bill Clinton can lay claim to being fiscally conservative. On his watch both the federal deficit and the national debt were reduced. He raised taxes in order to get the government’s house in order, and left office having presided over one of our best decades for both GDP growth and jobs generation – ever. Apparently raising taxes does wonders for growth and jobs.

Well I don’t want to go that far, but all the evidence points to the exact opposite of what we read in the media and what is presented as axiomatic thought in our discourse.

Which is why it has become so difficult to inject fact into our [non] debate.

Every time someone like me coughs politely and lists some fact about the debt or the deficit in order to help discussion we get accused of being engaged in a partisan ‘rant’, rather than in contributing to the discovery of a solution.

Well sorry about that.

That fact is that so far have we come unmoored from fact that no one wants to pay it any regard at all. I find that both offensive and stupid. If we, as a nation, are to get ourselves back onto a healthy long term economic trajectory, I, presumably naively, would have thought we would want to look at the evidence and then avoid repeating any mistakes we might find represented there. If dispassionate analysis is now a ‘rant’ then so be it.

To my jaundiced eye the last three decades have been a very long experiment in a certain kind of economics. Policies were based on two deeply held principles: that individuals should retain more of their own income; and that markets should decide how to allocate wealth. This led to lower taxes and less regulation. It also led to higher debts and deficits. And growth suffered throughout.

It need not have had this result.

Had the Republicans been true to their words they would have slashed government spending so as to avoid debts and deficits. That they did not explains everything: they understood that average Americans want social programs such as Social Security and Medicare, because that allows them to spend on other stuff and not to have to save for retirement or hospital stays. That boosts the middle class standard of living beyond were it would otherwise be. In other words ‘pure’ Republicanism is a losing ticket.

But it leaves us today with a massive conundrum.

This is compounded by the revolution that has taken place within the Republican party. The Reagan policies presumably upset some hard core GOP folks – the purists. Their analysis would agree with mine: Reagan was a sham. His conservatism was an illusion. He sold the country one thing and then enacted another. His was a halfway house to the great GOP goal of undoing the New Deal. But Reagan stopped short because of his perception that America was in love with the New Deal. To recommend undoing it was foolish politics.

The revolutionaries subsequently took over the GOP and began a different strategy: they adopted Grover Norquist’s ‘starve the beast’ approach. They realized that to get Americans to toss the New Deal overboard it would have to be presented as unaffordable. They would ‘regret’ having to be bearers of bad news, but they could represent themselves as hard nosed fiscally responsible folks. Their message would be: ‘sorry folks but we just can’t afford Social Security or Medicare anymore’

But first they needed to complete the destruction of our national budget. They had to adopt Leninist tactics: they had to destroy America to save it.

For skeptics amongst you I am afraid to report that the discussions leading up to the Bush tax cuts was exactly informed by Norquist’s ideas. Several right wingers came out and said that their strategy was precisely to cut off the flow of revenue into government and thus enable the downfall of the programs they hated so much. If they were to save us they had to burn us all down first. And we were complicit because a tax cut feels nice.

And what a great strategy it has turned out to be. It’s exactly where we are today.

Nowhere along the way did the Democrats alter their basic positions: they always have advocated health care reform and safety net programs. To the public they have always appeared to be the ‘big’ government party. Which they are. They just happen to be willing to make us pay for it. It is the GOP that has shifted so radically that their recent patron saint would now no longer fit under their ideological banner. This helps explain why the public has such a difficult time placing the blame for the deficit where it belongs. Such appropriate blame would require re-wiring traditional viewpoints so deeply held that it is impossible to contemplate let alone accomplish.

So here we are, faced with a fiscal black hole and all the Norquist notions are coming to fruition: the Democrats are getting heat for a deficit they did not create and the GOP is rallying behind a strategy paper calling for a cure that includes the wholesale elimination of both Social Security and Medicare.

Like arsonists who set fire to houses in order to ride the fire engine, the Republicans are presenting themselves as fiscal conservatives. The media and the voters, so inured to outmoded stereotypes allow that to happen.

And I get accused of ‘ranting’ when I point to the facts.

Well at least I now know Reagan wasn’t a Republican!